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Is Windows 10 Night light useless? Not really. Many of the research participants in the Sleep Health study are college students who are already heavily sleep-deprived due to external conditions.Ī non-yellow phone screen is not the underlying problem here, and turning your laptop's screen yellow won't fix it either. It was pretty common to see people using their iPhones right before going to sleep after working a stressful job in a tense city. Poor sleep tends to be more psychological (stress, anxiety, inadequate sleep hygiene) than a neurological/neurochemical disorder. In a previous life, I was a polysomnographic technologist (one who runs sleep studies) at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. The results were intriguing, as revealed in a press release: "In the whole sample, there were no differences across the three groups … Night Shift is not superior to using your phone without Night Shift or even using no phone at all." Breaking the results down into two groups, those which averaged about seven hours of sleep and another that slept less than six hours each night, yielded a slight difference: "Individuals who did not use a phone before bed experienced superior sleep quality relative to both those with normal phone use and those using Night Shift." In the other group, those who had less than six hours of sleep, using Night Shift or no phone, had no discernable impact. Participants had their phones monitored using an app called 'Moment,' sleep outcomes were measured using Actigraph GT3X+ wrist-worn accelerometers, and participants were instructed to stay in bed for 8 hours.Ī yellow screen won't make you sleep like a champ changing your lifestyle will. The experiment had three randomly assigned conditions which involved 60 minutes of iPhone use before bed with Night Shift (set to max), without Night Shift, and a third group told to abstain from the iPhone usage (and all light-emitting devices) before bed. The study itself is fascinating, if only because it is one of the only large-scale investigations to address the subject. The results can be extrapolated to the Windows 10 Night light feature and Night Light on Android, which rely on the same underlying assumptions about filtering out blue light. The study tracked the sleep of 167 people, ages 18 to 24, to see if filtering out blue light had any discernable effect on rest.
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A recent study published in the journal Sleep Health calls into question the efficacy of Apple's Night Shift feature in iPhones.
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